The project, which would add 3,400 new square feet and renovate an existing 1,700 square feet to CU's Astrophysics Research Laboratory on East Campus, received initial approval from the Board of Regents on Tuesday during a capital construction subcommittee meeting in Denver.

A clean room is a controlled environment with low levels of dust, airborne microbes, particles and chemical vapors for designing and building the scientific equipment that will travel aboard the spacecraft, which is named Hope, according to planning documents.

In May 2015, CU announced a partnership with the United Arab Emirates on a project known as the Emirates Mars Mission, which seeks to send a spacecraft to Mars to observe weather phenomena such as Martian clouds and dust storms, as well as changes in temperature, water vapor and other gases in the planet's atmosphere.

The mission is being led by 75 to 150 engineers from the United Arab Emirates, as well as CU faculty, staff and students.

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LASP, which currently leads NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission (MAVEN) and manages the Kepler and Kepler2 planet-hunting missions, is responsible for a number of elements for the Emirates Mars Mission. Arizona State University and University of California Berkeley are also working on the project.

The project is funded by the partnership between LASP and the United Arab Emirates, CU officials told the board on Tuesday morning.

If the full board approves the project in June, construction is set to begin in July and finish by January 2017. CU planning officials called it an "aggressive" timeline.

CU has asked the state to fund the aerospace project every year since 2010-11, according to state budget documents. Planners upgraded the project in 2014 to a free-standing building on East Campus, instead of an addition to the existing Engineering Center.

So far, the campus has not been successful in obtaining state funding for the aerospace engineering project. It plans to ask for $23.5 million in state capital construction funds in the 2017-18 fiscal year.

The total project cost is $80 million, with CU pledging to spend $51.5 million of campus cash.

Even if state funding doesn't come through in 2017-18, campus officials assured the board Tuesday that the $5 million spent on design would not be wasted.

Kelly Fox, the campus's chief financial officer, said her staff is considering a number of funding scenarios for the project.

"This building is critically important to the campus," Fox said. "So we don't have the answer today but I would say we're looking at all options. Could we phase this, could we spread out the costs, are there different approaches we could take? As we go through design, we would be looking at how we can get this building moving."

Hellems renovation

The regents also gave preliminary approval to the Boulder campus to update Hellems Arts and Sciences. The campus will request $30 million from the state in 2017-18 to address deterioration of the building's basic systems, such as electrical panels, windows and gutters.

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